Friday, November 15, 2013

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio's Education Promises

On June 14,
2013, at a candidate forum held at Murray Bergtraum High School, Bill de Blasio
pledged to
follow through on the following education policies if elected mayor, and signed
a document containing
these promises. (These are marked as Forum below.) In response to a survey sent
to all the mayoral candidates by NYC Kids PAC, de Blasio made other promises. (These are marked as Survey below.)

We have also included below certain key
pledges from press releases from his campaign and a quote from one of the first
mayoral debates.If you know of other important education promises de Blasio made
during his campaign, please add them below, along with citations.Thanks!

·Restore the district structure, with a superintendent who supervises principals and provides access for parents with issues and problems. (Survey)

·Support a change in the law so that
members of the Board of Education (currently called the Panel for Educational
Policy) have set terms and cannot be fired at will by the mayor. (Survey)

·Ensure
that all Board of Education members are given at least two weeks to discuss the
policy ideas at hand before bringing them to a vote. (Survey)

·Raise
the level of significance of the Community Education Councils. (Survey)

·Allow
CEC’s to vote on major school utilization changes in their communities and
require the Board of Education address the CEC position on major school
utilization changes during their meetings and work with the local CEC for
alternative solutions. (Survey)

·Work
with the CEC’s to develop district plans and portfolio assessments within their
respective communities to get an understanding what schools need to grow, what
schools have space and what schools are struggling. (Survey)

·Improve
the role of the Citywide Education Councils (High School, Special Education,
English Language Learners, D 75) by ensuring they provide written
recommendations to the Board of Education on policy issues related to their
respective councils. (Survey)

Special
Education and Busing

·DOE will seek recommendations from an
independent commission on school busing, with representation from disability
advocates, unions and parent groups, on standards for screening bidders,
creating routes, safety, training, and fair labor practices. (Forum)

·Provide independent monitoring to
determine whether students with disabilities are receiving all their mandated
services. (Forum)

·Agree
to commission a report, in consultation with Citywide Council on Special
Education and the District 75 Citywide Council, by an independent research
group on the implementation of the special education inclusion reform, including
survey results from parents, students, administrators and educators at the
school level. (Survey)

·Continue
to increase the learning opportunities for all students, especially students
with disabilities who are most vulnerable. (Survey)

·Survey
parents of children with disabilities to get an understanding of the related
services that are not being met. (Survey)

Support
staff

·Provide dedicated funding for positions
of school support staff and parent coordinators, and redefine the position of
parent coordinator so that parents have substantive input into their job
description, hiring, and evaluation. (Forum)

Parent
Engagement

·Support a change in the State Education
law so that all district public school parents have the right to vote for
Community Education Council members. (Forum)

·Ensure that all PTA and CEC meetings
are streamed online for parents who are unable to attend. (Survey)

·Create
customer service guidelines for all schools by identifying model parent
engagement schools and mirror these practices across the school system. In
addition, provide training and guidance to ensure every school and DOE office welcomes
and respects families. (Survey)

·Rescind
the ban on prohibiting students from bringing their cell phones to school.
(Survey)

·Ensure
that children, especially young children of color, are being given the
resources they need to succeed prior to being referred to special education.
This includes an emphasis on pre-kindergarten and early intervention. (Survey)

·Create Early Education Centers within
communities that will free up classroom space currently used for
pre-kindergarten in community schools. (Survey)

After-School

·Provide
after-school programs for all middle school students. (Survey)

Class Size

·Fight for the $3 billion in
court-ordered state funding owed to NYC to reduce class sizes as a result of
the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. (Survey)

·Commit to specific class size reduction
goals to achieve by the end of first mayoral term and if necessary, raise
revenue to fund this. (Forum and Survey)

·Comply
with the plan the city adopted in 2007, as a response to the Contracts for
Excellence law, calling for class size reduction in all grades. (Survey)

·Audit the Contracts for Excellence
budget to see how the city can re-prioritize reducing class size. (Survey)

·Work with school supervisors and
principals to adjust the school day schedule and maximize staff time with students.
(Survey)

·Re-evaluate
“fair student funding” to discern whether it has provided more equity or,
instead, incentives to principals to increase class size and/or get rid of
their experienced teachers. (Survey)

·Create
Early Education Centers within communities that will free up classroom space
currently used for pre-kindergarten in community schools. (Survey)

School overcrowding

·Support a more ambitious capital plan
that will provide the space necessary to eliminate overcrowding and allow for
smaller classes as well as devote sufficient funds for maintenance and repair.
(Forum and Survey)

·Reform
the blue book formula so it more accurately reflects overcrowding and
incorporates the need for smaller classes. (Survey)

·Commit to providing transparent enrollment
projections. (Survey)

Spending
priorities and privatization

·Reduce the spending on privatization,
outsourcing, contracts and consultants. (Survey)

·Enforce
provisions in state law, requiring co-located charter schools pay for the
services and space that they receive from the DOE. (Forum and Survey)

·Require
more information on how co-locations will impact programs for students with
disabilities in the building, establishing additional venues for parents to
relay their concerns, and a process in which the DOE responds to parent's
concerns. (Survey)

Small
schools, vocational schools and online learning

·Relax
the requirement that all new schools be of a small size. (Survey)

·Ensure
that students have full, face-to-face, in-person access to teacher, or continue
to expand online learning as the alternative. (Survey)

·Improve
Career and Technical Education programs. (Survey)

·Focus
on ensuring there are quality schools in EVERY neighborhood. (Survey)

·Create
an early warning system for schools that are falling further behind. (Survey)

·Schools
identified as struggling will receive targeted support through a new “Office of
Strategic Supports” housed in the DOE that will develop intervention strategies
in conjunction with the school communities and target individual high-need
schools which will receive short-term, intensive support. (Survey)

Transparency and Accountability

·Carry
out itemized, fully detailed breakdowns of education budget comparable to other
city agencies. (Survey)

·Respond
to FOILs in a timely and complete fashion. (Survey)

·Provide
an online log which reports on which FOILs have been submitted and when they
were responded to, with a link to the results [along the model of the Illinois
board of education; see http://www.isbe.state.il.us/foia/default.htm] (Survey)

·Require
more accurate reporting of class size and overcrowding. (Survey)

·Commission
independent and objective studies of major education initiatives. (Survey)

Privacy

·Stop the sharing of highly sensitive information
to vendors by the City without full parental knowledge and consent (Forum and Survey)

·Pull NYC student data out of the
inBloom cloud as soon as possible. (Survey)

Testing

·Minimize the use of high-stakes
standardized tests and agree to not use tests to decide which schools to close
and which students to be held back. (Forum)

·Craft a teacher evaluation system that
depends as little as possible on standardized test scores. (Survey)

·Refuse to expand standardized testing
into other grades (Pre-K to 2nd). (Survey)

·Pledge not to create new local
standardized exams. (Survey)

·Make admissions to all schools based on
more holistic factors, and especially Gifted and Talented programs and the
specialized high schools. (Survey)

·Encourage other NYC high schools to
join the portfolio/alternative assessment consortium as opposed to basing
graduation decisions on the results of the Regents exams. (Survey)

·Develop a non-punitive process by which
NYC parents can choose to have their children opt-out of standardized testing.
(Survey)

Community schools

·Expand
the community school model, which helps address mental health needs in our
City’s school system. (Survey)

After
School

·Dedicate funding for meaningful
community-based after school programs. (Forum)

·Adopt a Graduated Response Protocol to
resolve student misbehavior at school level. (Survey)

·Focus
the role of School Safety Agents (SSA) on behavior that requires law enforcement
response, by integrating SSA's with school administration team and conduct
conferencing between SSAs and principals prior to arrests. (Survey)

Diversity

·Ensure that curriculum, teaching, and
hiring practices in all New York City public schools reflect the culture,
history and language of the diversity of the City’s students. (Forum)

·Commit to issuing a substantive policy
paper by August 1st, explaining how to address the external
conditions/outside school factors that cause the achievement gap based on race,
class and zip code. (Forum)

·Make
sure that all children, regardless of socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity
have access to our City's selective and specialized high schools. (Survey)